Daily Puzzles and Minute Cryptic
I have been enjoying the excellent Minute Cryptic recently.
My daily rotation of daily puzzles is NYT Wordle, Mini, Connections, Chess.com daily puzzle, TimeGuessr and Minute Cryptic. The last two have been recent additions.
I also try to do the NYT main crossword whenever I can. Though I can manage only the first few days of the week as the second half of the week is much tougher.
Cryptic Crosswords are tough, and I never got into them earlier. Minute Cryptic has made it easy for me to pick it up. I have a long way before I start doing a Guardian cryptic, but it’s a start.
It has a daily puzzle - a single cryptic clue - which resets every day at midnight, so it is a great two minute mind-workout. It also has a membership for Mini Crosswords, archives, and other features.
Lets get to the basics of a Cryptic Clue and solve a Minute Cryptic puzzle.
This is a clue from Nov 12, 2025.
- Surface: The clue, as you read it, is called the surface. The sentence makes some weird sense, but most of the time it has nothing to do with the answer. This contains two ways to get to the answer. The definition, and the wordplay.
- Definition: Typically in the beginning or the end, there is the definition, which is a synonym (sometimes laterally) of the answer. If you are lucky or brilliant, you can just guess the answer by looking at the definition.
- Wordplay: Rest of the clue (sometimes definition included) is the wordplay. The wordplay will help you get to the clue. Wordplays can be a anagrams, addition, deletion, selection, synonyms or homonyms. Wordplay will have an "indicator" - to tell you what kind of a wordplay it is, and a "fodder" - which you use to perform the wordplay.
There is a lot more to it, but it is enough to start. I have found that it is better to learn the rest on the go.
In the clue above, the definition is either "black sheep" or "confused".
Next, we look for wordplay indicators.
"Beginning" looks like a selection indicator. Beginning of "moo" is "m".
"Confused" might be a anagram indicator - since it means that some thing could be mixed up. There are a surprising amount of anagram indicators is what I have realized. The most recent one I saw in a clue was "awkward". So, "if its confused" can be fisit, iftis, tifsi, etc.
In my first attempt, I thought it was just "its confused", but then I realized the clue needs six letters, so "if" has to be included to get all the letters.
So putting "m" and some combination of "ifits", we get "misfit", which means "black sheep".
And whenever I get these, without any help (which is about 50% of the time), I feel really happy. When I don't, I use the hints to understand which could be the indicators. Identifying this should get easier and I play more of these games. I am also really bad at anagrams - so when I know it is an anagram, I get all the letters, and use an anagram solver to get the answer. Not sure if I will get better at this!
Minute Cryptic also puts explainers for all the clues on their youtube channel which are great and very binge-able.
Thanks for the great work, Minute Cryptic team!
PS: I made a demo of me solving these puzzles here, just for fun.